The Worst Sort Of Foreshadowing
Hal Incandenza, speaking to his older brother, Orin, about how he (Hal) dealt with an impossible-to-satisfy shrink after being first on the scene of his father's gruesome death, an apparent suicide.
I even tried telling [the grief-counselor] that Himself was miserable and pancreatic and out of his tree half the time by then anyway . . . that even work and Wild Turkey weren't helping anymore, that he was despondent about something he was editing that turned out so bad he didn't want it released. That the ... that what happened was probably kind of a mercy, in the end.
- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest p. 253
Also see...
- Infinite Summer
- Kottke's extensive DFW coverage
New Rule For Hollywood
Autobots... roll out!
While watching the Hawks/Heat playoff game tonight, I saw a commercial that immediately got my attention with nothing but a voiceover. All I heard was: "This Summer..." and I immediately looked up at the TV. The speaker? None other than The Man himself, the voice of Optimus Prime, Peter Cullen.
The product? Coors Light.
I understand that Mr. Cullen works for a living and needs to earn a paycheck, but can't we all agree to limit his work to things that are tech related... or at least things that are so absolutely fantastic that they're worthy of his voice. He's Optimus Prime, and for those who grew up with the old cartoon, he always will be Optimus Prime.
Adult Swim, the home for cutting-edge animation? Perfect. Coors Light? Not so much.
Blogging and Email Join Forces
Neat new feature from WordPress allowing comment reply via email.
[I]nstead of clicking back to your dashboard, you can reply to the comment straight from e-mail. When you click reply, a special WordPress e-mail address will appear in the Sender line, matching your reply to the proper comment thread. Send it off, and your reply is up on your blog in seconds.
Gobs Of Data
I love the data visualization in this Sprint ad. Great to see someone (other than Google, of course) meaningfully presenting the extreme volume of data that's coursing around the globe at any given instant.
We are so many. Though this truth is tough to comprehend, it's also fundamental to accurate understanding, perspective and decision making in our information economy. Well done!
Winning vs. Justice
Our foundation, the rule of law.
From 2001-2008, the Department of Justice was transformed from a respectable, reasonably-run segment of the executive that operated to prosecute violations of the law into a partisan frat house on the Monday after a weekend-long party. Drunk with power, philosophically opposed to the rule of law, or simply used as a political tool, the DOJ under W followed the fundamental belief that if you are in charge and you win, then justice has been done. Though blind, Justice could still act improperly and at odds with political goals. Better to cover her, lest other goals be compromised. Regardless of the means, the ends were all that mattered.
Of course, winning is not the same as doing justice. As part of his campaign for President, Obama, an excellent lawyer in his own right, promised major changes to the DOJ. Once elected, our new President started at the top, installing an Attorney General who understands the import of the rule of law and of justice as central to the DOJ's mission.
As one of his first major acts, AG Holder shockingly decided not to contest the appeal of Ted Stevens. Formerly the Republican Senator from Alaska, Stevens had been convicted for corruption under W.
Now you might be saying to yourself "How could this have been a partisan play by W's cronies?" or "Why would the Republicans go after one of their own?" A number of reasons...
- Stevens had run into trouble with the press for pushing for pork projects such as the "bridge to nowhere."
- One of the oldest Senators, he seemed behind the times and out of touch, once famously calling the Internet a "series of tubes."
- Between 1 and 2, he was giving the party a bad name and hurting the party's image. As such, Senator Stevens had made himself expendable.
- With Gov. Palin running for Vice President as an anti-corruption, anti-establishment candidate, it helped her story to say that she got rid of corruption in her state. Who better for her to take down than Alaska's own long-serving, powerful state Senator?
- Ted Stevens represented a highly conservative constituancy. Even were he to be run out of town, it was likely that a different Republican would take his spot. In fact, even though he was facing these corruption charges during his campaign, Stevens was only narrowly defeated by his Democrat opponent.
So if the prosecution of Stevens was a partisan play by Republicans, then shouldn't Holder's decision to drop the case also be seen as partisan?
That argument might have some weight, had Holder not clearly stated his reasons for dropping the charges.
The federal judge presiding over the Stevens decision "said he had never seen such mishandling of a case by prosecutors. He took the extraordinary step of opening an investigation into whether the Justice Department attorneys broke the law by withholding evidence, and he encouraged Holder to increase training for new and experienced prosecutors."
In response, Holder said the following:
There are things that we have to take into account given what has happened recently, with regard to training, with regard to resources, and I expect that we'll have some announcements to make to you all in the not too distant future. . . .
I always want to ensure that the Justice Department acts in a way that is consistent with the long tradition of this great department — that we treat people fairly, that if we make mistakes we admit them and that we then take the appropriate action.
In other words, there's a new Sheriff in town.
What's more, Holder isn't stopping at spouting rhetoric to the press. A friend and federal Public Defender, passed on this quote today:
Your job as assistant US attorneys is not to convict people. Your job is not to win cases. Your job is to do justice. Your job is in every case, every decision that you make, to do the right thing. Anybody who asks you to do something other than that is to be ignored. Any policy that is at tension with that is to be questioned and brought to my attention. And I mean that.
-- Eric Holder, Attorney General of the United States
Notice that Holder wasn't talking to those who work directly for him, or to those in charge of big cases. He was talking to assistant US attorneys. He was talking to the foot soldiers of the department, the grunts, the younger attorneys who might have worked exclusively under the prior administration, the DOJ attorneys most in need of retraining.
And, with that statement, the pursuit of justice and respect for the rule of law returned to their proper places as guiding principles of the DOJ.
On Looting
Now that we own their sponsor, U.S. taxpayers should get a free Man U jersey with income tax payment. Or we should be able to have Rooney punch a banker. Either way.
Does listening to pundits discuss he financial crisis make your head spin, leaving you both angry and confused? Do you know that something in the discussion is just not right... in an Orwellian sense? Do you feel like you're watching the aftermath of the largest theft in the history of the world?
If so, you're not alone... and you're right to feel this way.
In the early nineties, a pair of economists classified the behavior that led to this debacle, described the environment that would make such behavior likely, and suggested that it would happen again as the natural result of that environment.
Sixteen years ago, two economists published a research paper with a delightfully simple title: “Looting.”
The economists were George Akerlof, who would later win a Nobel Prize, and Paul Romer, the renowned expert on economic growth. In the paper, they argued that . . . investors had borrowed huge amounts of money, made big profits when times were good and then left the government holding the bag for their eventual (and predictable) losses.
In a word, the investors looted. Someone trying to make an honest profit, Professors Akerlof and Romer said, would have operated in a completely different manner. The investors displayed a “total disregard for even the most basic principles of lending,” failing to verify standard information about their borrowers or, in some cases, even to ask for that information.
The investors “acted as if future losses were somebody else’s problem,” the economists wrote. “They were right.”
[Emphasis added.] Sound familiar?
On certain low-documentation loan programs, such as stated income/stated asset (SISA) loans, income and assets are simply stated on the loan application. On other loan programs, such as no income/no asset (NINA) loans, no income and assets are given on the loan application form. These loan programs open the door for unethical behavior by unscrupulous borrowers and lenders.These loan programs are designed for borrowers who have a hard time producing income and asset verifying documents, such as prior tax returns, or who have untraditional sources of income, such as tips, or a personal business. These loans are called liar loans because the SISA or NINA features open the door for abuse when borrowers or their mortgage brokers or loan officers overstate income and/or assets in order to qualify the borrower for a larger mortgage.
For more on how these loans were abused by lenders, see this Washington Post article from 2007. (And if you have more time, devote an hour to listen to "The Giant Pool of Money," a fantastic report by This American Life.)
So what about the idea that a lot of smart people just made innocent mistakes, or that this is a systemic problem that no one could have predicted? Looting is not just an error in judgment, but knowing, self-interested behavior.
The term that’s used to describe this general problem, of course, is moral hazard. When people are protected from the consequences of risky behavior, they behave in a pretty risky fashion. Bankers can make long-shot investments, knowing that they will keep the profits if they succeed, while the taxpayers will cover the losses.
[The distinction between moral hazard and looting is an important one.]
With moral hazard, bankers are making real wagers. If those wagers pay off, the government has no role in the transaction. With looting, the government’s involvement is crucial to the whole enterprise.
Knowing that their financial institutions were too big too fail, bankers made choices that were only rational in an environment where personal gains were all that mattered, and where a government bailout was seen as inevitable. The government was the escape route, the getaway driver... and the thieves got away scot free.
We should be angry. We've been robbed.
Internet Killed The Publishing Industry
The best article I've read in a while on the topic of the Internet's value and transformative effect, and it's relationship to the death of the newspaper. (via kottke and Daring Fireball)
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
. . .
Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it’s been Wal-Mart and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it’s been Richard Mellon Scaife. Increasingly, it’s you and me, donating our time. The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can’t be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case.
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.
W's Last Day
Just a reminder to enjoy the last day of W. He spent two full years of his presidency on vacation, but still managed to cause more than his fair share of trouble.
Harper's has put together an excellent, indexed retrospective of the Bush years (via Daring Fireball) and The Economist did a fantastic job recapping his body of work in their article George Bush's legacy: The frat boy ships out. Some highlights:
HE LEAVES the White House as one of the least popular and most divisive presidents in American history. At home, his approval rating has been stuck in the 20s for months; abroad, George Bush has presided over the most catastrophic collapse in America’s reputation since the second world war. The American economy is in deep recession, brought on by a crisis that forced Mr Bush to preside over huge and unpopular bail-outs.
America is embroiled in two wars, one of which Mr Bush launched against the tide of world opinion. The Bush family name, once among the most illustrious in American political life, is now so tainted that Jeb, George’s younger brother, recently decided not to run for the Senate from Florida. A Bush relative describes family gatherings as “funeral wakes”. . . .
Lack of curiosity also led Mr Bush to suspect intellectuals in general and academic experts in particular. David Frum, who wrote speeches for Mr Bush during his first term, noted that “conspicuous intelligence seemed actively unwelcome in the Bush White House”. . . .
Relentless partisanship led to the politicisation of almost everything Mr Bush did. He used his first televised address to justify putting strict limits on federal funding for stem-cell research, and used the first veto of his presidency to prevent the expansion of that funding. He appointed two “strict constructionist” judges to the Supreme Court, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, turned his back on the Kyoto protocol, dismissed several international treaties, particularly the anti-ballistic-missile treaty, loosened regulations on firearms and campaigned against gay marriage. His energy policy was written by Mr Cheney with the help of a handful of cronies from the energy industry. His lacklustre attorney-general Alberto Gonzales, who was forced to resign in disgrace, was only the most visible of an army of over-promoted, ideologically vetted homunculi.
The Iraq war was a case study of what happens when politicisation is mixed with incompetence. A long-standing convention holds that politics stops at the ocean’s edge. But Mr Bush and his inner circle labelled the Democrats “Defeaticrats” whenever they were reluctant to support extending the war from Afghanistan to Iraq. They manipulated intelligence to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and had close relations with al-Qaeda. This not only divided a country that had been brought together by September 11th; it also undermined popular support for what Mr Bush regarded as the central theme of his presidency, the war on terror.
And that's just the beginning. Read the rest here.
If you want to follow the Inaugural gala and participate online, some friends have helped set up a fantastic site dedicated to the occassion. Says the San Jose Mercury News:
LINK-live Presidential Inaugural Gala, Tuesday night:
It's billed as a party to celebrate technology serving humanity. Steven Chu, Lawrence Berkeley's Nobel laureate physicist and Obama's choice for energy secretary, is slated to receive "the nature award." You can attend virtually via www.linklive.org. And you can join the celebration online using Twitter (name: linklive; address: #linklive2009), ScribbleLive, Ustream and Flickr. We think we've got tickets, and would hate to miss Chu, the Bay Area's hottest — or is that coolest? — scientist.
Kottke Redesigns
Kottke's new look.
NYC-based blogger Jason Kottke has been one of the Internet's best for years, and he's been a daily read for me since sometime around 2000.
What's his blog about? Well, that's sorta tough to explain. Kottke acts as a filter for all of the vast information available on the Web, linking each day to the stories, tidbits and oddities he things are most interesting.
A keen eye, consumption of vast volumes of information, humility, and good taste seem to be Kottke's keys to success. He's also not afraid to take risks.
Today Kottke's trademark yellow-themed site was offline for a while. The placeholder posted on his site said he was making some changes to the site's backend.
The site has returned, and he did a whole lot more than change the backend. Gone is the yellow and the font he developed. Instead, the site has a graded-blue border, a subduded, Frontline-esque logo, a larger, consistent font, and posts that aren't clearly separated.
When reading any individual post, the larger font and framing blue gradient create a strong feeling that you're reading an individual page -- a piece of paper -- instead of a website or blog post. Scrolling through posts, however, feels more constrained and muddy -- the frame feels smaller, and there are no longer any clear separating elements between posts.
All told, the new look was a shock. In a couple months I'm sure I'll love the new look and think of the former design as passe. For now, I'll need to adjust. Bold change, nice move. Not that he's asking, but I'm impressed.
Fox Removes "Always Sunny" From Hulu
Fox to fans: "I'll eat your babies, bitch!"
After a brilliant musical finale to Season 3, Fox, in their infinite wisdom, has said screw you to the die hard fans who have supported Always Sunny and have ordered all three seasons removed from Hulu.
This is a show that got it's start when its stars/creators filmed a pilot with their home camera (for the cost of the videotapes) and got them to the head of fledgling cable network FX, who took a chance on the young comedic-genuses.
Hulu originally took the videos down asap and without warning to users. Below is their apology. Still, however, they say nothing about why Fox removed the show.
Can't Fox just say "we want to force fans to overpay for dvds" and be done with it? I'd even be fine with this policy if I thought The Gang was getting a big slice of the pie (as Frank would say) ... but I'm pretty sure that any extra coin is headed straight to the pockets of Fox execs. Bastards.
Hulu's apology: